Proliferation of biological weapons throughout the world has made accurate monitoring and detection of pathogenic biological agents ever more critical. Many of the biological detection systems currently in service and under development routinely require testing and retesting to ensure proper operation under field and laboratory conditions. Appreciating the risks of handling actual biological agents, non-pathogenic agents that possess similar detection characteristics or features are preferably used as a safer alternative for testing such systems.
One non-pathogenic biological agent, Enterobacterio phage MS2, referred herein as “bacteriophage MS2”, has been found to be well suited for simulating pathogenic biological agents particularly viral pathogens that are extremely harmful to humans and animals. Bacteriophage MS2 is a very small virus having a genome composed of ribonucleic acid (RNA). Current bacteriophage MS2 test assays typically experience low sensitivity and precision, and slow data acquisition and analysis. Moreover, the current test assays have poor specificity to the bacteriophage producing frequent false positives and high background noise. Test assays currently used are also complicated and require extensive sample processing, resulting in increased labor and costs.
Accordingly, there is a need for an assay and a method of detecting bacteriophage MS2 that is rapid, accurate and cost effective to implement. It would be also desirable to provide novel nucleic acid probes and primers useful for providing rapid and specific detection of bacteriophage MS2 in samples. There is a further need to develop assays for the detection of the non-pathogenic agent bacteriophage MS2 as a reliable prognosticator of the presence of pathogens having a sufficiently similar genetic profile.